A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘I associate that area… with having a family. It’s funny, isn’t it? They mean nothing to me now. Such distances. Other things started there too, I think. It was an age I was at. It would have been so nice to go back.’

  ‘Why? What would it have achieved?’

  ‘I don’t know. You would have come with me, would you?’

  ‘Of course I would. We could have stood by a lake at sunset, and held hands. It would have been very romantic.’

  ‘Perhaps I should see my parents… go and see them. What do you think?’

  ‘Perhaps we are both thwarted romantics, Robin, and it would have been the start of a passionate affair which would have been either the saving or the death of us both. Perhaps I could have swept you off your feet, and made you forget everything. Even the mysterious K.’

  ‘“K”? What do you mean?’

  ‘These sets of lovers you always write about. Always R and K. When are you going to tell me about her, Robin? When are you going to come clean?’

  When he did not answer, Aparna slipped back into her tone of fierce reminiscence. ‘Anyway. Promises, promises, always promises. You never phoned your friend. We never made it on our sentimental journey, second class. You were toying again, weren’t you? I’m not saying you realized it, I’m not saying that you meant to, but you weren’t being serious with me. Not really. When will you ever be serious about something, Robin? Life for you is just a gloomy irony – and that makes things so easy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m serious about my writing.’

  ‘Are you? There are a few serious ideas, I suppose, which you always make a point of slipping in: these little literary hobbies of yours, like suicide.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘Yes. There’s always a reference to suicide in your stories. Often quite gratuitous. Like that poor family, in your first story, or the depressed friend, in this one. Nothing ever comes of it. You flirt with the idea, as you do with everything else. Perhaps you’re doing it to prove –’

  ‘Look, Aparna, shall I tell you what I came here to tell you? I spoke to Emma today. Emma, my lawyer? She doesn’t want to defend me on a plea of not guilty any more. She thinks I did it.’

  Aparna lowered her eyes; and her voice, now, was all gentleness, all kindness.

  ‘I’m sorry, Robin. I had no idea, you know I hadn’t. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I don’t know what to say.’

  Robin was hoarse with unhappiness; he could barely speak.

  ‘Could I have another cup of tea, please?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She took the two mugs and went into the kitchen; and as she filled the kettle, reached for the tea bags, poured the milk, she bit her lip and tried to find encouraging words, forms of consolation. Perhaps she would ask Robin to stay for the evening, cook him a meal, snap herself out of this vengeful mood. She made the tea as fast as she could, and went to rejoin him. She would sit next to him on the sofa.

  But Robin had gone. And the other thing she noticed was that, instead of the childish laughter and shouting, she could hear a confusion of more urgent, adult voices rising from the playground. Not knowing, not guessing, not even fearing, she rushed out onto the balcony, and looked down. Already quite a crowd had gathered around the body.

  PART FOUR

  The Unlucky Man

  Friday 19th December, 1986

  It was at last beginning to dawn on Hugh that he would never find an academic job. The realization had made its inroads slowly, like the winter weather, and he had developed the same way of coping with both, namely lying in bed for as long as possible, with the gas fire turned up to top heat. Half the time he would doze, half the time he would be wide awake, staring frog-eyed at the ceiling, his hand resting absently on his genitals. In this position, in order to avoid thinking of the future, he would think of the past. He would rehearse the proudest episodes of his life and compare them with his present state of stifled inertia: his graduation; his six-month tour of Italy and the Greek islands; the flush of intellectual excitement in which he had completed his MA thesis; his first sexual conquest; his second sexual conquest; his last sexual conquest; the publication of his note on line 25 of ‘Little Gidding’ in a 1976 issue of Notes and Queries; the second graduation ceremony, at which he had been awarded his doctorate.

  But always at the front of his mind there festered the knowledge that these events had taken place a long time ago. They had all occurred within a period of eight years, and since then nearly the same period had elapsed, and in all that time nothing had happened. Not a solitary highlight. This meant, among other things, that Hugh had developed a very confused sense of the passage of time: he was aware that eight years had passed since he had received his final degree, but because there were no landmarks to punctuate these years, he could no longer distinguish them from one another, or achieve any grasp of their cumulative span. That day of triumph in Coventry cathedral seemed neither recent nor distant; it seemed, if anything, to belong to a quite different level of existence. His life now comprised other realities: the hiss of the gas fire and the heavy warmth of his bedroom; the texture of pubic hair as he twined it around his index finger; the smell (to which he had long since become immune) of the unwashed socks and underpants stashed under the bed; and the daily routine of forcing himself, at about 2.30, out of his bed, out of the flat, onto a bus and onto the university campus, in search of a kind of companionship.

  Three o’clock found him walking through the rain to the bus station at Pool Meadow. There was an icy wind and in the distance, from the precinct, he could hear Christmas carols being played over a tannoy system. This reminded him that soon he would have to go back and visit his family, choose cards and presents, and he scowled. They would ask him the usual questions – ‘When are you going to get yourself a job?’, ‘Are you seeing anyone at the moment?’ – and he would have to suffer the subtle taunts of his younger brother who sold bathroom fittings for a company based in Aberdeen and made more money in a month than Hugh had ever earned in his life. But there would be decent meals and when it all got too much he could go up to his bedroom and smoke. Before anything else he would have to phone his parents and get them to send down the money for the rail fare home.

  He was one of three passengers on the bus, and had the top deck to himself for the whole journey. At various stops he looked out for familiar faces – friends, lecturers, students who might have been staying up for part of the vacation – but none appeared; perhaps the weather was keeping them indoors. Similarly, there were no other customers in the coffee bar. Friday afternoons out of term were always quiet, but today there seemed to be a level of inactivity which unsettled even Hugh, accustomed as he was to the atmosphere of empty cafés and deserted bars. Sometimes he chatted to the woman who served behind the counter but he could tell that she wasn’t in the mood this time; she was reading a magazine, and anyway he couldn’t think of anything to say. So he sat and made his cup of hot chocolate last for nearly half an hour, until another customer finally appeared: it was Dr Corbett, the English department’s recently appointed senior lecturer. Being, like most of the staff, on cordial terms with Hugh, he came over and joined him. He had a beard and a leather jacket and had bought himself some coffee and a piece of chocolate cake. They exchanged murmured greetings, after which Corbett began eating his cake and Hugh was able to come up with nothing more original than:

  ‘Quiet today, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it’s getting on for Christmas,’ said the highly acclaimed author of The Intelligent Heart: Thought and Feeling in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.

  ‘Been working on something today, have you?’ Hugh asked. ‘A new book or something?’

  ‘Examiners’ meeting,’ said Corbett, with his mouth full. ‘We had to fix the questions today, for next term’s paper, on the poetry course.’

  ‘That was today?’ said Hugh, incredulous. ‘Was Davis there?’

  Corbett nodded.

  ‘But he said he’
d tell me when you were having that meeting,’ said Hugh. ‘He told me that I could come along. He said I could come along and make some suggestions. I’d worked out a question. I’d got this question all worked out. And it was today! Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘You couldn’t really have come along,’ said Corbett. ‘It was just for the teaching staff.’

  ‘So who set the question on Eliot?’

  ‘Davis did.’

  ‘Davis? But Davis doesn’t know a thing about Eliot. He doesn’t have the first faintest bloody idea about Eliot. What was his question?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something about The Waste Land.’

  ‘But it’s always The Waste Land. That’s why I was going to come along. I’d got this brilliant question all worked out. It was all about “Little Gidding”,’

  Corbett smiled. ‘Your pet subject.’

  ‘Exactly. You know Malcolm Kirkby, do you?’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard of him, yes.’

  ‘Wrote that book about the Four Quartets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you know what he said about me, don’t you? In that book.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you know I had that thing published in Notes and Queries?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘It was about line 25 of “Little Gidding”,’

  ‘What was it – a note, or a query?’

  ‘Well, it was a sort of note, I suppose. Anyway, do you know what he said about it in his book?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He said it would never be possible to read that line in the same way again. Following my note. It’s changed the whole thing, according to him.’

  ‘That’s quite a compliment.’

  ‘So I know what I’m talking about. I’m telling you, I could set a better question than Davis, any day of the week.’

  ‘Well, he’s pretty much played out, that bloke, if you want my opinion. He’ll be retiring in a year or two. He can’t even remember what he’s meant to be talking about, half the time. The students are always complaining about it.’

  ‘So why’s he still teaching? Why can’t you get some new blood into the department? You’re cutting your own throats, you know, because in ten years’ time it’s going to be dead from the neck up.’

  ‘We don’t have the money. Cutbacks, economies – we’re all having to tighten our belts.’ Corbett wiped away the last of the chocolate cake from the edges of his mouth, and added: ‘It’s no use getting angry about it. Universities have been overmanning themselves for years, just like industry.’

  ‘Well, you can afford to say that, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s not complacency, Hugh. It’s realism,’ said the distinguished editor of Men and Mountains: Essays on the Political Commitment of the Artist. ‘I mean, I know all about the problems that people like yourself are facing these days. But look on the bright side.’

  ‘There’s a bright side? Tell me about it.’

  ‘Well, at least you’re over the first hurdle. At least you’ve got your Ph.D. A lot of people don’t even get that far: they don’t have the staying power. For instance – did you ever meet that friend of Robin’s, Aparna? Aparna Indrani.’

  ‘Yes, I met her a few times. Why?’

  ‘Did you know she’s left?’

  ‘Left? When?’

  ‘A couple of months ago, apparently. She never told me about it, or anybody else in the department, and I’m supposed to be her bloody supervisor. Just packed her bags and left. Left half of her stuff in store here, and nobody knows when she’s going to come back and collect it. And not a word about finishing her thesis. Just dumped the whole lot in my pigeon-hole, without a note or anything. Didn’t even take it with her.’

  ‘So what’s all that about?’

  ‘Like I said, no staying power. I mean, she’d been messing around with the thing for nearly six years, and I’d been pretty patient with her, I can tell you. But there you are.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  ‘She just couldn’t… get it all together,’ said the author of the much-vaunted pamphlet, ‘The Psychology of Female Creativity’, recently published as part of the Studies in Contemporary Aesthetics series. ‘Too screwed up with problems of her own, probably.’

  They contemplated this diagnosis for a few moments.

  ‘I never liked her that much, I must say,’ said Hugh. ‘She was a prickly woman. Always picking you up if you said something she didn’t like. In a way you’d expect her to leave in a huff like that.’

  ‘Well, it’s no skin off my nose,’ said Corbett. ‘At least I don’t have to read the stuff any more.’

  A lone student arrived at the periphery of the café, took a slow, mournful look around, and left. Hugh went over to the serving counter to order two coffees, but the woman was nowhere to be seen and his shouts of ‘Hello’ in the direction of the kitchen went unanswered.

  ‘She’ll probably be back in a minute,’ he said, returning to the table. He was still thinking about Aparna. ‘Perhaps she was upset about what happened to Robin.’

  ‘Maybe. I heard – I mean, probably it was just a rumour – but I heard that they were having some sort of affair.’

  ‘Almost certainly, I should think. They were seeing each other all the time, towards the end. I can’t be sure, because Robin never used to confide in me about things like that. I don’t know why – I was his friend, after all. But he could be pretty stand-offish when it suited him. I suppose he was just another of these people with no staying power. Only in a rather more extreme sense.’

  ‘Well, who knows what goes on inside the head of a bloke like that.’

  ‘I think frustration with work had a lot to do with it,’ said Hugh. ‘He wasn’t getting anywhere with his thesis. Even I could see that.’

  ‘The guy was off his trolley, basically,’ said Corbett, whose series of lectures on the relationships between madness and intellectual achievement had been one of the highlights of the autumn term. ‘We don’t have to make excuses. Mind you, as far as his work went, I should think that being supervised by Davis would have been enough to send anyone round the twist.’

  ‘I gather he’s not the most dynamic of supervisors. They only ever met up about once a year, or something.’

  ‘He’s out of order. Past it. The sooner we can persuade him to pack it in, the better it’ll be for everybody.’

  At this point Professor Davis himself wandered into the café, carrying a battered old briefcase and wiping his spectacles with a dirty handkerchief. After spotting Hugh and Dr Corbett, and after some brief hesitation, he came to join them. Corbett fetched him a chair and Hugh insisted on buying him some coffee and a macaroon. There was a long pause while he struggled to get the lid off his plastic carton of cream, sugared the coffee, ate about half of the cake and blew his nose. Then, looking thoughtful, he remarked:

  ‘Very wet, today.’

  Hugh nodded in attentive agreement.

  ‘Outside,’ Davis added, to clear up any ambiguity.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘On a day like this,’ said Davis, weighing his words with extreme care, ‘you need an umbrella.’

  ‘Or an anorak,’ said Corbett. ‘An anorak with a hood.’

  ‘Quite.’

  He took a sip of coffee, and decided to add another lump of sugar.

  ‘Still,’ said Hugh, ‘it’s nearly Christmas.’

  ‘True,’ said Professor Davis. ‘Very true. The end of another year. Time marches on.’

  ‘It seems to have gone very quickly, this year,’ said Corbett.

  ‘I think it’s gone slowly,’ said Hugh.

  ‘These things are relative,’ said Davis, ‘in the long run. A year only seems long if a lot has happened in it. I would say that quite a lot has happened, in the last year.’

  ‘Do you mean globally,’ said Hugh, ‘or locally?’

  ‘Both,’ said Davis. ‘There was Westland. There was Libya. There was Chernobyl. There was that nasty l
eak in the roof of the Staff Club dining room.’

  ‘And there was Robin,’ said Dr Corbett.

  ‘Precisely. There was Robin.’

  A respectful silence ensued.

  ‘Hugh and I were wondering,’ said Corbett, ‘whether the real problem with Robin was his work. Did anyone ever see his work, apart from you? Was it any good?’

  ‘What was it about, Robin’s thesis?’

  ‘Well,’ said Professor Davis, ‘it covered a wide range of literary topics, from a variety of different viewpoints.’

  ‘Would you say his approach was… theoretical?’

  ‘It could have been described as theoretical, yes.’

  ‘Rather than practical?’

  ‘It could also have been described as practical, I suppose.’

  ‘Would you say his methodology was… Marxist?’

  ‘It had elements of Marxism, undoubtedly.’

  ‘As opposed to formalist?’

  ‘But he had certain formalist leanings, it has to be said.’

  ‘Did he confine his researches to a particular author, or a particular period?’

  ‘He might have done, in the fullness of time. You see, his work never really took shape. He had difficulty getting his thoughts down on paper.’

  ‘Did you ever read any of his stories?’ asked Hugh, and they both turned to look at him in surprise.

  ‘He wrote stories?’

  ‘Yes. He had these illusions about wanting to be a writer. He didn’t use to talk about them much, but one night when we both got drunk back at his place he showed me these stories he’d written. I read them all.’

  ‘What sort of stories were they?’